Nightmares are
illusive, ephemeral things that vanish soon after we wake up. Okay,
except when we elect one. That’s what’s known as a political
nightmare.

We all have nightmares. Some of us wake up in a cold sweat
because we’re being chased down the street by a gorilla with a
knife. Others because we feel like we’re falling down a bottomless
pit for hours on end. Still others have nightmares in which scientists
announce that they’ve figured out a safe, cheap, and easy way to
clone a human being, marketing it in a form that you can pop in the
microwave and have in less than five minutes. Unfortunately it only
comes in one flavor, and that’s Regis.

Now
that’s scary.

No one
knows what causes nightmares, or for that matter, what they mean. But
that doesn’t stop people from trying to figure them out. The Greeks
tried, Freud tried, even the woman in the house on the highway leading
out of town which has the sign with the huge red palm on it—the
international symbol for “Bored old woman watching TV waiting for
people with more money than sense”— tries to figure them out. But
nightmares are illusive, ephemeral things that vanish soon after we
wake up. Okay, except when we elect one. That’s what’s known as a
political nightmare.

Nightmares, it turns out, are more political than you think. And
they’re not bipartisan either. I know this doesn’t sound like the
American Way, but it’s true. Don’t worry, I’m sure that will
change soon. When members of Congress hear about this they’re bound
to pass a law. Or a constitutional amendment. Or at least that taco
they had for lunch in the Senate cafeteria. Congress, you see, is on a
pass/fail system—if they don’t pass enough bills they may fail to
be re-elected. No wonder they wake up screaming. Well, that and the
fact that they have a family vacation coming up and only have two
offers from lobbying groups for free trips, neither of which are to a
country their daughters haven’t been too. Twice.

Just as
hypochondriacs get sick and paranoids have real enemies, phobics have
things they should be afraid of. And so do you.

The
revelation about partisan nightmares came to light in a study by a
teacher at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA (motto:
“In God we trust, though we still study just to play it safe”). He
found that Republicans have three times as many nightmares as
Democrats, and they didn’t count any that include Senator James
Jeffords. The most common nightmares were that they were giving a
speech in front of Congress and discovered they had no clothes on,
that Ted Kennedy was giving a speech in front of Congress and had no
clothes on, and that Dick Cheney’s pacemaker had a sympathy power
outage for its big relatives in California and left George Bush with
no one sitting next to him to whisper the answers to him. Just
kidding. Well, about the first two anyway.

Not
only do Republicans have more nightmares, it turns out they have
different kinds. Kelly Bulkeley, who presented the results of his
research to the American Association for the Study of Dreams (motto:
“Better living through…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”), says Republicans have
dreams that resemble their daily lives while Democrats have more
bizarre ones. Independents, on the other hand, dream that they have a
chance in hell of getting elected.

This
is enough to give a person oneirophobia, which is a fear of dreams. Or
possibly politicophobia, a fear of politicians. And yes, these phobias
really do exist. It turns out there’s a phobia for just about
anything you can think of, including lutraphobia (a fear of otters),
automatonophobia (ventriloquist's dummies), and arachibutyrophobia (a
fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth). There’s
also a word for someone with a fear of having a ventriloquist’s
dummy that looks like a peanut-butter-flavored otter getting stuck to
the roof of their mouth: committable. (You can find these and more at www.phobialist.com,
where they have the names of over 530 phobias and swear they haven’t
made any of them up.)

You should be
afraid that Disney’s California Adventure is opening a new
attraction based on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” And really
afraid that they’re probably considering “Fear Factor” as the
next one.

A phobia isn’t a regular fear, it’s an exaggerated and
illogical one. That’s why the list doesn’t have pantophobia (a
fear of mimes), meltphobia (a fear that Michael Jackson will end up
looking like the inside of a grilled cheese sandwich), and
Moreschneiderphobia (a fear that they’ll make The Animal-2).
After all, there’s nothing illogical about any of these.

Just
as hypochondriacs get sick and paranoids have real enemies, phobics
have things they should be afraid of. And so do you. For example, you
should be afraid that Takeru Kobayashi, the 5-foot-7, 131-pound kid
from Japan who ate 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes at the Nathan’s
International Federation of Competitive Eating contest will show up at
your front door and ask “What’s for dinner?” You should be
afraid if the dogs sniffing around your bags at customs aren’t
drug-sniffing ones, but the cadaver-sniffing ones they have in
Washington, DC.

You
should be afraid that Disney’s California Adventure is opening a new
attraction based on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” And really
afraid that they’re probably considering “Fear Factor” as the
next one. You should be afraid that they’re selling Hello Kitty 1998
Bordeaux in Duty Free Stores in Europe and Asia. And even more afraid
that they’ve probably kicked around the idea of Hello Pussy condoms.

If the
thought of these make you shiver, then you’re normal. On the other
hand, if they make you break out in a cold sweat and you’re not a
sleeping Democrat having a nightmare about Robert Packwood coming out
in support of Gary Condit, then maybe you have panophobia, which is a
fear of everything. Good luck. You’re on your own.